


Questions

by firjii



Category: Rise Of The Tomb Raider - Fandom, Tomb Raider (Video Games)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Anxiety, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst, Survivor Guilt, friendfic, injury mention, referenced injuries, spirituality (canon compliant)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-07
Updated: 2019-10-07
Packaged: 2020-11-26 12:01:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20929883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firjii/pseuds/firjii
Summary: Exhausted, injured, and slightly delirious after escaping one of Trinity’s bases, Lara finally has a chance to pause and recuperate in the relative safety among Jacob’s people. As she reflects on choice and duty, she confesses some of her frustrations to Jacob.





	Questions

Lara’s legs folded awkwardly and she sank onto the pallet harder than she expected to. She banged the back of her head against the shack’s timber wall in the process.

“Easy,” Jacob murmured. He clunked a cup of stew on a table and rushed over to her a little too late.

She rubbed her head, but the movement that it required of her arm made her flinch. A very stifled groan sounded deep in her throat. “It’s alright. I barely hit it. It just surprised me.”

He crouched. “Sit still. I would have checked your injuries sooner, but we could only stay in one place for so long.” Jacob checked her eyes and pulse in silence.

“Could you help if something was wrong?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes not.” He prompted her to move her head. “We have much of the knowledge we need, but not always the tools to do something about it.” Satisfied with the range of motion in her neck, he stood and retrieved the stew. “Here. A crossing like that would have broken any spirit. An empty stomach won’t help.”

Despite the seasoning in the stew, she ate blankly, as if forcing bland or undercooked fare into her mouth.

“You’ll need time, too.”

Lara shook her head as she took two more meager mouthfuls and meekly poked at the remains of the cup’s contents with the wooden spoon. “You saw what Trinity did. We don’t _have_ time.”

“There’s enough left for you to get your bearings. You’re little use to anyone if you can’t even stand without swaying.”

Lara set the food aside and dug her fingernails into the shack wall. Her mouth twisted with the effort, but she stood. She squared her shoulders and straightened until she was at her full height, her frame a little lacking before Jacob.

Jacob raised an eyebrow.

Lara’s face greened. She locked her knees, but her exhaustion simply traveled up to her shoulders.

Jacob braced her as her knees failed. He guided her back down to the pallet and knelt. “When was the last time you rested?”

She propped herself against the wall. “It’s alright. Give me two or three hours. I’ll be fine.”

He moved away from her and slid onto his feet. “That’s not what I meant.”

She blinked with effort.

A ghost of a chuckle escaped him. “It’s not a difficult question.”

Something flickered and half-formed in her eyes but disappeared sooner than it had surfaced. “Your people live off the land. You worry about survival above all else, because even if you’re willing to die for your purpose, someone needs to stay alive to guard that purpose. And out here, _any_ mistake can be your last. Sometimes the choice is between –” She swallowed with effort. “Sometimes victory doesn’t exist. Sometimes success only means cheating death another day. Some of the world calls that a harsh life, but you do what you must. And so do I.”

She frowned. Travel’s heaviness made the journey to her own question scattered, but it willed itself out of the shadows after another moment. She wasn’t sure why she was thinking about it, but now that it was here and she had a moment, she indulged herself.

Had she been speaking English? Had Jacob? Each language she knew lived in a different corner of her concentration, but with everything inside her drenched in panic or blood or sweat or grime or all of them put together, every thought had a hazy sheen protecting it. Who were these people, aside from the descendants of the Prophet’s followers? Where had they come from? What would they be now if they weren’t eking out survival here?

She sighed so hard that her torso crumpled a little. “Deserts and mountains aren’t forgiving. Armed helicopters aren’t forgiving. My _hunt_ isn’t forgiving.” Her forehead danced as she pushed the words out.

“‘Forgiving.’” His eyes squinted for an instant. “You confuse mistakes with tragedy.”

“They’re not always different.” She clenched and unclenched a hand several times in empty air as she searched for words. “When was I supposed to rest? When can _anyone_?” She waved an arm, but the gesture was pinched.

Jacob bent his head down and aimed a scowl at his boots, but he kept his silence.

“It shouldn’t be so hard to understand. Your people have made a life here. Not everyone could have done the same. Sometimes your enemy is winter. Sometimes it’s a wolf or a bear. Now it’s Trinity. But your fight never stops.”

“Hmm,” he grunted in accord. “Apparently, neither does yours.”

“You’re –” She swallowed. “I don’t know what you’re protecting here other than yourselves, but it’s something you’re all willing to die for.”

"We have no choice.” 

“What makes you think I _do_?”

“Lara, we came here because we were _forced_ to, and we stay because we _must_. You _decided_ when and how to start your path.”

Lara closed her eyes and rubbed her face hard.

“But I –”

Lara’s eyes whipped up to him.

He took a moment to choose his words. “I don’t think you decided to be on a path to begin with.”

She shook her head weakly to herself. “Well.” The single word escaped on a single anemic chuckle. “Here we are.”

He nodded. “Here we are.”

Her jaw tightened. She nodded dejectedly. “And after all you’ve been through, I had to bring more trouble here. I’m sorry.”

“I wouldn’t be free if you hadn’t found me.”

“But you’re _not_ free. _None_ of you are. You can’t leave, even if you want to. And Trinity knows you’re here because of me.”

“This is hardly the first time someone has hunted for our secrets. They already knew. They would have come anyway.”

Lara shifted and shook her head again.

Jacob grimaced slightly. “For now, all is well enough. You should sleep.”

Lara’s mouth opened and closed mutely several times, her outward stubbornness weakening each time. She nodded and crumpled down onto the pallet, but as her full weight met with it, a jolt went through her limbs. A strangled howl left her.

Jacob guided her as she sat up. “Let me see.”

She chuckled. “If your people used money, I’d bet everything I have that you’ve seen worse. And I have – _quite a lot_ to bet.” She pulled up the back of her shirt several inches, wincing all the while.

Jacob stared. Silence surrounded the shack. “Some of these are old.”

Lara snorted. “Old enough to not hurt anymore, but not old enough to forget.” 

“And a different story behind all of them.”

“Different parts of _one _story.”

Jacob considered the freshest of the injuries. Three bruises nearly the size of her fist loomed near her spine. A dozen or more small lacerations, most barely closed, pocked her back. Remarkably, her ribs seemed relatively unscathed. “There’s nothing much to bandage here, praise be.”

She murmured agreement.

“But are you always this unlucky?”

Lara scoffed and pulled her shirt back down. “It’s not as bad as it looks.” She turned her head halfway around to glance at him. “If it was, I wouldn’t be awake to tell you that. Sometimes you hit your mark. Sometimes you don’t.”

Jacob nodded as his eyebrows soared. “And sometimes you shatter a rib or paralyze yourself when you misjudge a jump. They’re only bones – nothing _very_ important, hmm?”

Lara winced at the sharp words spoken so softly from a kind throat. No, not exactly a kind one, not entirely. Earnest, exhausted, fierce – and all hiding under the same question that took shape again.

Jacob sighed. “I’m sorry.”

“No, _I_ am.” Her voice was pale and small.

“I don’t have enough herbs here to treat them. I’ll send someone out to gather more. For now, rest.”

Lara’s eyes became heavier with each blink, but she forced herself to remain sitting upright. “I think I stopped resting the day my father left me.”

Jacob nodded minimally. He gazed out the open door at some faraway point for a long moment. “Then sleep.”

She sat awhile longer before she gave in to her exhaustion and inched her head down onto the pillow. With a great deal more wincing and flinching, she shifted onto her side.

Jacob lingered, unmoving.

Lara stared at the corner of the shack. “How do I finish this?” Her jaw barely moved as she pushed the words out.

“Some things in life are never over. They only move into a different season.”

“But how can I fix this before that happens?”

Lara went on staring listlessly. Jacob scowled. “Who said that you needed to?”

Unsatisfied with her head’s placement on the pillow, she wedged a forearm under her face. “It’s different when there’s blood on your hands.”

“You don’t just mean Trinity.”

Her face suddenly bore signs of suppressed contortions or twitches. “Nothing is ever just one thing.” She grabbed for a shaking breath. “Everything feeds into everything else. It’s like a stream that joins a river that-”

“Stop,” he cut her off, though his voice was scarcely louder than hers. He took her free hand.

Lara frowned lightly at the gesture for an instant but didn’t pull her arm away. She sniffled.

“You can’t solve any problem in a single day – not when they’re problems like yours and mine. Trouble often comes to us easier than answers do.” His head bobbed up and down with each word. “There’s little point in pretending otherwise.”

“I wish everything was that simple.”

“There’s nothing simple about it. You shouldn’t blame yourself for not knowing what _most_ don’t know. Many souls spend their entire lives looking for that one truth.” He swallowed somberly. “And anyone who finds it has paid dearly for it. We both know that.”

Jacob held her hand in both of his, lowered his head, and closed his eyes.

She shifted slightly to get a better look at him. “What are you doing?”

A string of noises bubbled from him – words whispered carefully and almost too softly to hear.

It was a prayer, or something very close to one – of course it was, that was only fitting given his people’s heritage – but –

It only sounded like noise. _Which language was it?_ Her forehead knotted. She made herself still and listened. Surely it wasn’t that difficult to piece out.

Except it _was_. Jacob repeated the words over and over, small variations gradually overtaking the phrases.

The ideas in the scrolls and fragments she’d found poked a crack in her lull as they came flooding back to her. Truth like liquid, being born to every language, hardened fanatics repaid with generosity instead of generous vengeance– 

No, that wasn’t right. It couldn’t have been.

Legend and myth and history had a way of bleeding into each other. They could keep each other alive through all of mankind’s best efforts to annihilate them. The more contentious they were, the more they mirrored and mimicked each other and the vaguer the lines became, perhaps only to make it more difficult to erase anything. If just one of them was protected, the others could be salvaged – but sometimes it took many generations to recover even one piece of it. Lara had many. Jacob’s people had many, too – anyone who had endured through as much as they had wouldn’t have willingly forgotten what had forged them.

She couldn’t just sleep. She didn’t even try. Instead, she breathed and listened. Jacob’s prayer cycled around again and again, his earnestness never faltering. Yet still he only whispered – and still she couldn’t untangle the words.

It was so different from all the running. Too much running. Too much flailing. Too much clawing to hold on. One thing after another after another. Bad trailed bad. Luck chained on and on by its own devices or will until it left indentations everywhere, in everything.

_What was that language._

A few rogue tears escaped and rolled down her face. Her patience was as ragged and fickle as her physical body was just now. It would all make more sense if she would just sleep – if she _could_ sleep.

She’d managed it in subzero temperatures and howling winds with little shelter. Why was it so far beyond reach _here_, of all places? The valley was a climatological marvel, temperate for Russia. The air had the smell of early autumn. Lara dimly heard the sounds of life in the village as the moments passed: conversation, cooking, wood being hammered, fresh-forged metal singing as it was tempered into tools or shapes. But for all the energy that their way of life demanded for the simplest tasks, Jacob’s people had an inner stillness, as if their closeness with nature allowed their presence to augment it.

Those noises were easy to ignore. Jacob’s words _weren’t_, even if she didn’t know what they meant. They called out to another time and reached out to something that didn’t exist anymore – except for him, it _did_, as if he could drag it out of the lost depths of so much endangered culture at will. For what purpose? That wasn’t the point. It was as real as the lives that these people-of-myth had made through stubbornness, through stoic duty, through agonizing trial and error.

Her eyes finally became too heavy to prop open. Jacob’s prayer flowed on and on. Her last thought floated loose like mist rising from a lake.

_Which language was it?_

Did it really matter?


End file.
